Finding Someone To Go Backpacking With?

Travelled By

Brucini started seriously travelling after attempting to move to Queenstown, New Zealand, in 1996.Inspired by drunkenly meeting a world of travelers on a Kiwi Experience bus, he changed his plans and roamed the world for a year. ...Find out more!

Sometimes when you go backpacking you want to start off travelling with someone else. It makes sense for safety and intermittent loneliness reasons. It’s good to have someone to talk to and help figure out travel problems with.

But finding someone to go backpacking with is not always easy. Not every one wants to go where you want to, when you want to. There are some good websites out there to help you, however. Use them to find someone when you can’t find someone within your immediate friend network going your way.

Here’s a few of the better resources to start with. As you can see the travel friend/mate/companion business is almost a culture within a culture:

You could also post your details to popular travel forums and travel blog sites. The sites listed have connections-specific features and a formalised system in place where you can look for others going your way with relative ease.

Once you are travelling it’s highly likely you’ll meet people and make friends.

I was looking at a list of my friends on Facebook the other day and I realised that at least a third of the people on the list I had met while travelling. They aren’t just acquaintances, they are friends.

Maybe I shouldn’t be so surprised. Travelling is a social activity. You can experience intense moments that are often the highlights of your life with people you meet for a relatively brief amount of time.

Mates in every country

I remember the first real backpacking trip I did was to New Zealand to do Kiwi Experience down the west coast of the South Island in 1997. On that trip I met two people who I still consider to be close friends even though they live in England and the Netherlands respectively. We only get to meet every few years at best, yet the bond we forged whilst travelling together for such a short time remains so strong.

When I was thinking about the interesting people I had met travelling, it got me thinking. If I had the choice of anyone in the world to travel with next time, who would I travel with and where?

Hmmm, I reckon I’d choose actor Gael Garcia Bernal (Motorcycle Diaries) to travel South America with. I’ve not been there yet, and he’d be a great translator in bars through out the continent.

Your Turn:

Who would you go backpacking with if you could travel with anyone in the world? And where would you go? Leave your answer in the comments.